[cmake-developers] Future of ccmake and cmake-gui

[Eric Wing]

On 8/16/17, Jean-Michaël Celerier <jeanmichael.celerier at gmail.com> wrote:
> @Eric Wing
>> I am not making a strong push for this, but I want to bring it up to
> at least get people thinking about this... I am disturbed by the size
> and complexity of Qt. My past experiences have not been good and I
> find it a massive chore to get an environment setup (especially on Mac
> and Windows...and building Qt on Raspberry Pi is a nightmare).
>
> Really ? On mac it's just brew install qt. On windows choco install qt-sdk
> (and it even comes with mingw so that you don't necessarily have to install
> visual studio).
> On Raspberry sudo apt-get install qtbase5-dev.
>

So 3rd party package systems are banned for me. They cause too many
dependency problems themselves. For example, I've seen way too many
projects screw up with Brew because they fail to ship a binary that
can work on a clean user system who is not going to install Brew.
Also, it causes needless redundancy and changes the toolset if I
recall. It pulls a new version of gcc instead of using Xcode/clang on
your system and builds an entire dependency chain based on GNU tools.
Similar problem for Windows...Visual Studio is the requirement.

As for Pi, I think the problem I had was the Qt available in the repo
at the time was too old for me. (Typical Debian long release cycle
problem.)

But I still consider it a problem if these things are too hard to
build because (especially for me) there is always a new platform that
needs to be ported to.


> Building qt itself is a matter of doing (cue errors from typing in a mail
> without checking)
>
> git clone https://github.com/qt/qt5
> cd qt5 ; git submodule update --init qtbase ... # whatever submodules you
> need
> ./configure -open-source -confirm-license -nomake tests -nomake examples
> -prefix /opt/my-qt
> make -j8 && make install
>

My last experience was that there were critical bugs in the Qt Mac
release at the time (and this was the official binary release). And
Mac doesn't have configure/autotools by defaul. Again...no brew for
various reasons like above.

>
> Maybe consider a LTCG build (-ltcg) if this really matters ? This way I can
> get a moderately complex GUI app that uses gui, widgets, network, qml,
> etc...
> under ten megabytes, so something like cmake-gui should be way smaller...
> (this also removes any problem related to DLLs).

I wouldn't be able to say. And I never figured why Qt's RAM
consumption footprint is so high...based on all the DLL binary code it
has to load, or something more intrinsic to its implementation.


-Eric